There's a question that shows up for most educators somewhere around year ten.
It doesn't come in with a dramatic entrance. It just starts to surface in quiet moments. The car after a long day. The shower on a Saturday morning. A family event where someone asks a casual question and you can't quite answer it without bringing up the job.
The question is some version of this: who am I when I'm not the role?
I want to sit with that for a minute. I think it's one of the most important questions in an educator's career, and almost nobody gets prepared for it.
Here's what happens.
You choose education for reasons that are good. Mine was Coach Thwaites, my high school coach. He was like a second dad to me at a time when I needed one, and somewhere along the way I decided I wanted to be a Coach Thwaites for somebody else. That's the whole reason I'm in this profession.
Whatever your reason is, it's yours. And early on, it feels like a job. Something you do.
Then the years pile up. You get better at it. You take on more. People start seeing you as the work. Your students, their parents, your colleagues, even your own family. The role and the self start to blend together.
By year ten, something's shifted. You don't feel like a person who does this job anymore. You feel like the job. The role has grown into the identity.
That's not a bad thing, actually. Most educators who stay long enough to do real work go through some version of this. It's part of what makes the work mean something. You're not performing a function. You're living a vocation.
But it comes with a cost. And most people don't see it coming.
When the role changes, or ends, the self has to change with it. And if you haven't kept some version of yourself outside the role…that transition is brutal.
I've watched it happen. Educators who retired. Educators who moved out of the classroom into admin. Educators who stepped down from leadership. Educators who left the field entirely. The ones who struggled hardest weren't the ones who missed the work. They were the ones who didn't know who they were without it.
This matters right now, even if you're nowhere near a transition.
The practice is simple: keep a small part of yourself that isn't an educator. Not as a hobby. Not as self-care. As identity maintenance. A version of you that exists for no professional reason at all.
Could be a friendship that has nothing to do with school. A creative outlet nobody associates with your career. A physical practice that's just for you. An hour a week that belongs to no one but you.
The content matters less than the principle. Something that would still be yours if tomorrow, for whatever reason, you stopped being the principal or teacher.
I think about this more than people would guess. Even now, I catch myself asking the question I spent years avoiding. Who am I outside of this?
The answer isn't automatic. But it's findable. And the finding starts now. Not at some future transition point, whenever that comes.
One thing to try this week: Name one part of yourself that exists for no professional reason. Protect an hour for it next week. See what it feels like to actually spend time there.
The Principal's Chair: The educators who retire best are almost never the ones who gave the most. They're the ones who kept a life running alongside the career. Build both.
See you in two weeks.
David
educatorlifelab.com